When the news broke last week of Manchester City's loadsamoney bid to buy Kaka, one senior, seasoned Premier League figure said with complete certainty: "Milan won't sell." What, I asked, they'll turn down £100m, in a global recession, for one player? "It's not [Silvio] Berlusconi's style," he said. "Selling is not what he's about."

The sorry collapse of the Kaka saga should teach Manchester City many things – about how football works, what it takes to build a balanced team – but it should also prompt Sheikh Mansour to decide what his purchase of Manchester City is actually about. The Kaka bid, for money beyond sums ever conceived in football before, seemed to point to an identity crisis, between owning a Premier League club to represent enduring values of respect with which the Abu Dhabi ruling family wants to be internationally associated, and a compulsion to throw around unfathomable amounts of money.

The dominant reaction among football fans and commentators has been that the proposed £100m for Kaka was "obscene", particularly in an economic environment of mass job losses, bank bail-outs and Woollies closing down. There has also been some disquiet in Arab opinion at Sheikh Mansour on the back page, throwing £100m and the reported £500,000 a week at Kaka, while on the front page the people of Gaza were being slaughtered and going perilously short of food, water and medicines.

Being dubbed obscene, vulgar, misguided and ultimately hamfisted was not what Sheikh Mansour and his advisers had in mind when they bought Manchester City from the beleaguered Thaksin Shinawatra last August. The front man for the deal then was Sulaiman Al Fahim, a limelight-hogger who blathered about signing Cristiano Ronaldo, Cesc Fábregas and a sticker book of other stars, boasting that the Abu Dhabi pockets were "very deep", swiftly earning City a derisive backlash.

That tone was recognised as too flash by Mansour's image adviser, an English expat, Simon Pearce, now a City director. A new chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, was appointed, adopting a more respectful approach, and Mansour wrote a well-judged public letter to City fans, explaining that he wanted to listen and learn, about City and its heritage, "build a structure for the future not just a team of all-stars", and maintain the club's place in its local community.

Pearce's work in Abu Dhabi has included developing a "brand" for the country itself, formally adopted by Mansour's ruling Al Nahyan family as: "Respect, for heritage, family, culture and tradition." Mansour's purchase of City was clearly part of a strategy to promote Abu Dhabi as a country of rich success, underpinned by enduring values, which would also bolster the ruling dynasty's legitimacy.

Then, in the very next transfer window, Mansour's City launched an outrageous bid, for unprecedented money, to make the world's best player an offer he couldn't refuse, at a time when Scott Parker, Craig Bellamy and a centre-back would have done nicely. However close Garry Cook, City's executive chairman, maintains he got to a deal, ultimately Kaka, the cleanest-cut of football heroes, was able to say he turned down unimaginable riches, and Berlusconi, of all people, could mount the moral high ground.

"Some things are more important than money," the Milan owner and Italian prime minister said. "All the world of football must be happy for this because money cannot buy everything."

That, as the master populist knew, struck the mood. If a morality lesson has to be delivered by Berlusconi, then Mansour and his men should realise they have a problem. They would do well to think hard about City now, not just about how to build a football team, but about what the "brand", the sky blue Manchester club, truly represents, and how it can be nurtured steadily from serial cock-up to success, in a way which truly deserves respect. Loadsamoney, they might remember, was a figure of fun.